Post-Macroeconomics : Reflections on the Crisis and Strategic Directions Ahead

Abstract

For decades, many researchers argued
 that economics had nothing to fear from enriching itself
 with lessons and advances from other disciplines.
 Unfortunately, these suggestions were either neglected or
 dismissed upfront in what was then arbitrarily considered
 mainstream economics. The global crisis has led even Nobel
 Prize winners to acknowledge that the problem facing
 economists and policy makers today is mostly intellectual -
 it is the need to confront the systematic failure of
 thinking, especially on the part of macroeconomists. Despite
 its unprecedented magnitude and heavy financial, human, and
 intellectual cost, the crisis certainly does not invalidate
 everything that has been learned about macroeconomics.
 However, the costs highlight some of mistakes of the
 dominant intellectual macroeconomic framework.
 Post-macroeconomics should not be understood as another
 metanarrative of the end of metanarratives. The use of the
 prefix post here suggests and emphasizes much more than
 temporal posterity. Post-macroeconomics should follow from
 macroeconomics more than it follows after macroeconomics.
 The theorizing of post-macroeconomics is therefore neither
 systematically oppositional nor hegemonic. It does not
 advocate a - dialectic opposition - between macroeconomics
 and post-macroeconomics. Rather, it suggests that the latter
 builds on the former and goes beyond it.